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Overview

With their tonsured heads, white faces, and striking cowls, the monkeys might vaguely resemble the Capuchin monks for whom they were named. How they act is something else entirely. They climb onto each other's shoulders four deep to frighten enemies. They test friendship by sticking their fingers up one another's noses. They often nurse--but sometimes kill--each other's offspring. They use sex as a means of communicating. And they negotiate a remarkably intricate network of alliances, simian politics, and social intrigue. Not monkish, perhaps, but as we see in this downright ethnographic account of the capuchins of Lomas Barbudal, their world is as complex, ritualistic, and structured as any society.

Manipulative Monkeys takes us into a Costa Rican forest teeming with simian drama, where since 1990 primatologists Susan Perry and Joseph H. Manson have followed the lives of four generations of capuchins. What the authors describe is behavior as entertaining--and occasionally as alarming--as it is recognizable: the competition and cooperation, the jockeying for position and status, the peaceful years under an alpha male devolving into bloody chaos, and the complex traditions passed from one generation to the next. Interspersed with their observations of the monkeys' lives are the authors' colorful tales of the challenges of tropical fieldwork--a mixture so rich that by the book's end we know what it is to be a wild capuchin monkey or a field primatologist. And we are left with a clear sense of the importance of these endangered monkeys for understanding human behavioral evolution.

What People Are Saying

Frans de Waal

Capuchins are no regular monkeys. They have huge brains, and seem about as smart and 'cultured' as any ape. I know of no better guides to their social life than Susan Perry and Joe Manson, who have devoted their lives to studying these often overlooked creatures in the jungles of Costa Rica. The result is an account that is bound to fascinate and surprise, because the behavior of wild capuchins exceeds our wildest imagination.
— Frans de Waal, author of Our Inner ApeCapuchins are no regular monkeys. They have huge brains, and seem about as smart and 'cultured' as any ape. I know of no better guides to their social life than Susan Perry and Joe Manson, who have devoted their lives to studying these often overlooked creatures in the jungles of Costa Rica. The result is an account that is bound to fascinate and surprise, because the behavior of wild capuchins exceeds our wildest imagination.

Frans de Waal

Capuchins are no regular monkeys. They have huge brains, and seem about as smart and 'cultured' as any ape. I know of no better guides to their social life than Susan Perry and Joe Manson, who have devoted their lives to studying these often overlooked creatures in the jungles of Costa Rica. The result is an account that is bound to fascinate and surprise, because the behavior of wild capuchins exceeds our wildest imagination.
— Frans de Waal, author of Our Inner Ape

Editorial Reviews

Times Higher Education Supplement

Susan Perry and Joseph H. Manson‘s book reveals capuchins as having social lives as rich and as complex as those...of humans...Perry‘s book, with her husband and research partner, is far more than just stories about monkeys’ social lives. It offers fascinating biology from Costa Rica’s tropical forests, including the small, somewhat ugly, Machiavellian capuchin monkeys. They act as the focus for a discourse that ranges over “big questions”: why evolve large brains and intelligence; how do youngsters learn group-typical behavior; why does lethal aggression occur? These questions are embedded in the human drama of fieldwork; snakes, bugs of all kinds, plants with deadly toxicity, ill-fated collaborations, deep friendships and human poachers...We desperately need such studies to be sustained. Let’s hope this fascinating book will go some way towards achieving this aim.
— Phyllis C. Lee

Times Higher Education Supplement

Susan Perry and Joseph H. Manson‘s book reveals capuchins as having social lives as rich and as complex as those...of humans...Perry‘s book, with her husband and research partner, is far more than just stories about monkeys’ social lives. It offers fascinating biology from Costa Rica’s tropical forests, including the small, somewhat ugly, Machiavellian capuchin monkeys. They act as the focus for a discourse that ranges over “big questions”: why evolve large brains and intelligence; how do youngsters learn group-typical behavior; why does lethal aggression occur? These questions are embedded in the human drama of fieldwork; snakes, bugs of all kinds, plants with deadly toxicity, ill-fated collaborations, deep friendships and human poachers...We desperately need such studies to be sustained. Let’s hope this fascinating book will go some way towards achieving this aim.
— Phyllis C. Lee

Frans De Waal

Capuchins are no regular monkeys. They have huge brains, and seem about as smart and 'cultured' as any ape. I know of no better guides to their social life than Susan Perry and Joe Manson, who have devoted their lives to studying these often overlooked creatures in the jungles of Costa Rica. The result is an account that is bound to fascinate and surprise, because the behavior of wild capuchins exceeds our wildest imagination.

Times Higher Education Supplement
- Phyllis C. Lee

Susan Perry and Joseph H. Manson‘s book reveals capuchins as having social lives as rich and as complex as those...of humans...Perry‘s book, with her husband and research partner, is far more than just stories about monkeys’ social lives. It offers fascinating biology from Costa Rica’s tropical forests, including the small, somewhat ugly, Machiavellian capuchin monkeys. They act as the focus for a discourse that ranges over “big questions”: why evolve large brains and intelligence; how do youngsters learn group-typical behavior; why does lethal aggression occur? These questions are embedded in the human drama of fieldwork; snakes, bugs of all kinds, plants with deadly toxicity, ill-fated collaborations, deep friendships and human poachers...We desperately need such studies to be sustained. Let’s hope this fascinating book will go some way towards achieving this aim.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1
All in a Day's Work 8
The Social Intelligence Debate and the Origins of the Lomas Barbudal Monkey Project 27
The Challenges of Foraging and Self-Medication 53
Predators, Prey, and Personality 72
Capuchin Communication 89
Abby and Tattle: Two Females' Political Careers 116
Curmudgeon: The Career of an Alpha Male 134
Moth and Tranquilo: The Strategies of Incoming Alpha Males 168
Kola and Jordan: Lethal Aggression and the Importance of Allies 199
Miffin, Nobu, and Abby: Capuchin Mothers, Infants, and Babysitters 220
Guapo: Innovation and Tradition in the Creation of Bond-Testing Rituals 245
Social Learning and the Roots of Culture 264
Nobu and La Lucha sin Fin: Conservation of Tropical Dry Forests 288
Epilogue 308
Cast of Characters 317
Timeline of Events in Abby's and Rambo's Groups 325
Glossary of Behavioral Terms in the Capuchin Communicative Repertoire 329
Works Cited 332
Acknowledgments 347
Index 351

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Posted September 27, 2011

Disappointed.

I bought this for my anthropology class and even though the printed version ay my student store was half the price of the Nook book, I thought that having the digital version would be more convenient for class. However, there are no pictures and the price is outrageous for such a poorly put together book. The content of the book itself is fascinating though.

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